SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT

Quite soon now, and just off Chiswick Mall, there lived a hus­band and wife called Adam and Vanessa. Adam had taken a First in Greats and was rather high up in the Treasury, but his real passion was making little models of Regency furniture which he slivered and snipped and stuck on a tray on his knees after dinner. Vanessa, who had been to the Slade and made their own Christmas cards, was a housewife because she thought it essential to the formation of the individuated female; her after-dinner thing was needlework-pictures. They had two or three children who went first to a not-too-progressive prep-school and then to very conventional public-schools because this was felt to be a necessary counter to the, well, unusual atmosphere of their home. And while, after dinner, Adam and Vanessa shavered and stitched, they would talk intelligently, or they would play the discs they bought after checking them in The Record Year, or they would listen to some­thing ideating on the Third; or sometimes they went to friends or friends came to them, and quite often they managed to dump the children and find a little pub abroad. It wasn’t, they often said, that they’d anything against it, but simply that their own lives seemed so very full that they wouldn’t know what to do with a TV set if they had one.

But when the BBC started up its “TV 3rd” and the ITA countered with “Egghead Entertainment”, Adam and Vanessa, like most of their friends, came to the conclusion that one mustn’t, any longer, shut one’s eyes to the possibility that here was a new art form and, after all, it was simply a question of being master of the thing and not its servant. It wasn’t as if there’d very often be anything they cared to watch; and right from the start they’d make a rule that there was no question of the children being allowed to look in.

So they bought a set and they put it in the drawing-room and a man came to show them how it worked, but for quite a long time they never turned it on at all. “We don’t want to form a habit,” they said with unctuous unease as they screwed and sewed, which was why, though they’d often talked about it, they’d never actually tried mescalin, despite the friend who’d been to Mexico and said he thought he could get hold of some. Then one evening, after they’d been looking through the Radio Times to see just when it was that Bertrand Russell and Father Copplestone were having an argy-bargy about God on the Third, they noticed that Les Huis Clos was being done in the original on the TV 3rd that very eve­ning.

Well, there couldn’t be any doubt that that was the kind of thing they’d bought the set for, so they switched it on. At first they tried it with the lights so that they could get on with their work, but, as Adam eventually said, quite apart from the fact that it was harder to see the screen, you couldn’t achieve empathy that way; so they sat in the dark and gave themselves up to it, making rather louder noises of response than they would have done if it had been in English. “It’s, really surprisingly effective,” Vanessa said at one point, presumably when empathy was a little weak, but when it .w-as over Adam switched the set off very quickly and said, “Well, I think that will do us for some time,” and Vanessa agreed.

And so, no doubt, it would, if it hadn’t been that the very next night they were doing Les Huit Clos in French again, but with another company, for this was the tail-end of a series called “Essays in Comparative Appreciation”, and, as it happened, people at both the office and the local espresso-bar that day had told Adam and Vanessa how very determined they were to essay some more compar­ative appreciation that very night. And one thing led to another, you know how it is, for TV makes common conversational ground and one looks forward as well as back, and soon it happened that — well, say, every other night, Adam and Vanessa were looking at TV.

One thing, of course, that contributed to this was the determina­tion of both BBC and ITA not to be outcultured. Sartre in French on the one would be followed Pirandello in Italian on the other. If John Berger did Social Art on the BBC, pretty soon there’d been Patrick Heron on Solitary Creation on the ITA. Collages were coun­tered by montages, objets trouvis by objets fails, Rimbaud by Rilke, Byzantine Chant by Ambrosian Modes. There was no letting up. Pretty soon Adam and Vanessa found that the initiating programme on the BBC would be followed by the counter to last night’s ITA and on ITA vice-versa, and this meant, not only that there was always something, but that, very very often, consecutive programmes must be viewed. Of course, on the BBC it didn’t really matter, but on the ITA this meant ADVERTISEMENTS.

Adam and Vanessa were naturally one of the very first to buy an Ad-Suppressor, where you clicked a switch and got rid of the sound, and then they could smile at each other with pitying contempt for the soundless puppets mouthing their debased jingles about YUM and YOO. It wasn’t until a long time afterwards that Vanessa noticed that YUM and YOO were what she always bought now, and then she laughed and said that she supposed, as an artist, she found visual stimulants more effective than auditory ones; she did have some idea of changing to BUM and BOO, but one of her tenets was that housekeeping should be carried on at a more or less unconscious level, and after all, she said, she didn’t suppose there was any real difference between them.

They didn’t actually sell the gramophone, because they always supposed they’d eventually revert to pure sound, but meantime it was hard to explain precisely how one was’affected by some strangely imaginative and yet wholly unemotional angles of instrumental movement and technique. They had thought of going to Paris for the inside of a week but they didn’t, because, as Adam pointed out with a passing word from Oscar Wilde, that Eurovision feature called April is the cruellest month (the title was English because the programme was French — when ITA dubbed it later, they called it Mois des Floraisons ) gave one such an extraordinarily powerful yet entirely satisfactory and valuable vision that it would be a pity to adulterate it with purely personal impressions, and besides, by going away they’d miss this and that, and, such was the peculiarly individual and evanescent quality of the medium, that what you’d missed, you missed for ever. They didn’t have friends in anymore and nor did their friends because of an idea everyone had that TV entertaining was what they supposed they shouldn’t call the lower classes did. , The worm got into the Regency furniture, the moth got into the needlework-pictures and I’ve forgotten what happened to the children, but then so did Adam and Vanessa.